Frog Under A Coconut Shell Page 10

  It must have been a major expedition for Mak to try and get me into school when she could neither speak English or read the written word. To say that she was a very determined woman would probably be an understatement. She put my two younger sisters and our youngest brother in the care of a neighbour and she dragged me from school to school. I was apprehensive about this new world she was going to introduce me to and yet was filled with excitement. She made me wear shoes for the occasion. Now being forced into shoes meant it had to be a special occasion! All the kampong children did not wear shoes. I was no exception and I particularly enjoyed kicking rainbows out of puddles, feel the grains of sand between my toes, the coarse grass sinking under my soles. This inclination to go round barefoot was inherited from the Malay side of our ancestry, so that feet could breathe and find their natural shape, unlike the Chinese who bound their women’s feet to keep them from growing so that they remained dainty. But for the school-finding trip, my mother made me wear white, frilly socks with shiny black shoes which squeezed the breadth of my feet and squashed my toes. My toes are so spread out that no shoes have yet been made which can fit my feet comfortably.

  “And what big feet you have,” said David in his mock Red Riding Hood voice when he first saw them, making me self-conscious of them from then on. It hadn’t occurred to me that Westerners would have different feet, narrow, toes pressed tightly together, sometimes with the little toe overlapping the fourth. No wonder they suffer so much from ingrown toe nails and athlete’s foot. My toes are so widely spread out that the wind whistles through them, blowing dry any moisture or sweat, not allowing fungus to grow. My feet were a shock to him as his were to me. He looked down at them and said, “In actual fact they are absolutely prehensile.”

  English humour takes getting used to. The trouble was I proved my toes’ agility. I usually used them like fingers only in the secrecy of my boudoir, but on that fateful day, we were at a restaurant at EPCOT in Disney World, Florida. David and I went into the Chinese restaurant for lunch. I placed my sunglasses on the table. While we were eating, I accidentally elbowed the sunglasses off the table and they fell onto the floor. Without thinking, I automatically slipped my right foot out from my shoe and used my bare toes to pick them up and in one quick sweep returned them to the table. The American guy at the table right next to us, chopsticks frozen in mid-air, said, “Gee, that’s a pretty neat trick. Can you do that again? My friend didn’t see it.” David flushed crimson red. And it wasn’t from the spicy Szechuan Chicken either.

  On the day of the school hunt, my feet were hurting in my plastic shoes made for daintier feet. My mother believed that if I looked presentable, I would be accepted into school. But there is presentable and there is presentable. I still grow hot with embarrassment when I recall what Mak made me wear. To get me prepared, she washed my hair with Sunlight soap and combed it into two thick plaits. She even permitted me my hoop gold earrings, which I was only allowed to wear during Chinese New Year. She must have had some jewellery left over from her better days, because she pawned hers to buy me mine. A year or so before, she had my ears pierced by Inchik Kassim, the authorised village Ear Piercer. This was in the days when there was no automatic gun piercer nor alcohol swab, and ear piercing was only for girls. The only boys who had their ears pierced were those who had a problem with their testes descending. You knew which testicle had not descended properly by the side which the earring was worn. It always amuses me these days to see men wearing one-sided earrings because it reminds me of what we used to believe! I wonder what Inchik Kassim would make of it if he is still alive. The Malay man was well-liked in the village and though he was quite large in his body, he had very soft, gentle hands which kneaded the ear lobe to prepare it for taking the needle or safety pin. Most of the village girls had their ears pierced by the time they were six. So when I was due to have mine done, it was natural for Mak to engage Inchik Kassim to do it. He began by rubbing fresh garlic juice onto my ear lobes. I was filled with horror when I saw him burn the sharp end of a silver sewing needle over a naked flame. My mother clamped me with her legs and her arms circled my body as Inchik Kassim’s hand approached me. He sent the hot needle through my ear lobe and I howled and peed in my pants. Worse was to follow as he used a piece of garlic stem to force the hole to open wide. I howled and peed again. He stopped only when the garlic stem was properly lodged in my ear lobe. Then he repeated the whole procedure again for the other ear. And I repeated the whole procedure again, howling and peeing in my pants, the sand at my feet, soggy with pee. When the holes healed, he tied a red thread to the end of the stem and pulled the thread through to tie it in a loop. I am amazed today what Inchik Kassim probably knew or guessed instinctively, that garlic juice could help fight infection. Only after the pierced holes were clean and neat and not weeping was my mother given permission to put the earrings in. They were the only pieces of gold I owned which Mak intended should form part of my pia-kim, my wedding accoutrement. Only 24-carat gold is cherished because it has a reddish quality much loved by the Chinese and is a symbol of good luck and is reckoned to ward away evil. Warding away evil is a big thing in Chinese communities.

  I also knew school hunt day was special because Mak made me wear a proper dress which she had sewed. Store bought things were a luxury. When I was a teenager, I used to leaf through old copies of Her World and looked at the beautiful bras and panties that were advertised and promised myself that one day, I would be able to afford them. Today, one of my pet indulgences is buying beautiful bra and pants sets. Home sewn panties did not hug to the shape of your bottom and their leg holes were so large that you have to be careful how you sat. Made from cheap cotton, they usually bulged and billowed under a dress, so figure-hugging dresses would look ghastly. Until I had my period and had small swellings on my chest, I used to run around bare-chested. How I loved it when it rained, when I could go and stand under the pouring sky, twirling and swirling, feeling the rainwater drench my hair, touch my face, my body here and there. It was magical. On cooler days, I might wear a short A-line shift. We had dresses made for the first day of Chinese New Year because it was lucky to wear something new. I remember a lament of my mother when Chinese New Year was creeping up, with its superstitious demands for new things around the house and new clothes.

  “New Year coming and don’t even have one cent,” she said sadly.

  In those years, the boys had one new shirt each from the flea market. Flea markets were dumping grounds for rejected, stolen and second-hand goods. My mother believed that a person transferred his energy to his clothes, so she would not buy us second-hand clothes worn by other people even though we were very poor. But she was not opposed to buying us new, though imperfectly sewn clothes or clothes discoloured by the sun. Flea markets were noisy affairs with hundreds of open stalls, laden with all sorts of goods, from clothes to household items to food. The most famous one was at Sungei Road and was also called Robinson’s Petang and there were others at Macpherson’s and Six Mile on Serangoon Road. Except for Robinson’s Petang , most of the stalls tended to be open only in the evenings because it was cooler and such open markets were called Pasar Malam or Night Market. Usually, a noisy generator provided the electricity to light up the bulbs that were strung above the stalls. Some of the more affluent stallholders had a tent-roof but more often than not, the stalls were right in the open and if it rained, there was a rush for sheets of tarpaulin to cover their wares. Throngs of people visited such markets, their voices loud, chattering loudly; stallholders and potential customers bargaining furiously.

  My sisters’ and my dresses were usually made from the previous year’s curtains. When I was a teenager and saw Vivien Leigh as Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With The Wind, pulling down the green drapes to make a new dress for herself, I recalled my childhood years and thought that such a situation was not just Hollywood dramatisation and could happen in the 1950s in Singapore. You can make grand ballgowns from curtains. Especially when you have a mother l
ike mine, whose long, graceful fingers could snip and cut with dexterity and flair. Mak had an artistic eye and could copy a pattern from an old copy of Her World, a local woman’s magazine. (She herself never wore anything other than the sarong kebaya.) She always dressed us three girls like identical triplets. People thought it was because she wanted us to look like sisters, but actually it was for a more practical reason — our dresses were cut from the same length of curtain. This was usually from the drapes that separated our living room from the bedroom. It was one thing to wear dresses in identical material with your sisters, but quite another when your brother’s shirt, too, was made from the same curtain! Poor Matthew, I wondered how he felt.

  So we set off that important day with me in my Chinese New Year’s dress that had a full skirt, with a can-can underneath which was horribly warm and scratchy. Mak knew that can-cans were in fashion and she thought it would give the impression that we were fashionable and were not simply country bumpkins. She was definitely out to impress.

  From our house to the main road, there was at least half a mile of sandy track called a lorong, a track which the heavy monsoon rains had dug out in places creating huge pot-holes. Fortunately, on that day, as we were making our way out to the tarmac street, Abu Bakar came by on his bullock cart and offered us a ride. Abu Bakar was one of our neighbours and he earned a living by gathering hay or cutting fresh grass and selling it to people who kept livestock. He also sold cow’s manure and sometimes his open cart was piled high with hot steaming manure. He was a common sight, trundling up and down our dusty kampong road with his bullock cart making deliveries. Inchik Abu Bakar was in his 40s and had a firm, brown torso which he revealed because he hardly ever wore a shirt. Generally, all he would be dressed in was his checked sarong with a songkok on his head, as he was the day he picked us up. Fortunately, too, on the day he picked us up, he was only carrying hay.

  Mak sat up-front with him and I sat at the back fidgeting with my can-can, which was causing rashes on my skin because it was such a hot day. I must have looked a sight, dressed in my Sunday best, perched on the edge of a bullock cart, my legs dangling, with hay piled up behind me and mud clinging to the wheels. He whipped the curved back of the bullock gently with a cane to get it going. The cart smelled of cow dung and I worried that the smell might transfer itself to my outfit. Still, it was such a neighbourly thing for Abu Bakar to give us a lift and my mother innocently accepted the offer. She could not have known what the consequences were going to be. The bullock’s hooves and cart-wheels kicked up dust as we passed Kakar’s provision shop where the scent of fragrant spices piled high in the sacks rose to meet our noses; Nenek Boyan’s kueh stall, her colourful cakes beautifully arranged, her renowned mee siam in a heap in the large enamel basin. We also passed Ah Gu’s bicycle shop where Ah Gu was sitting on the wooden stool outside his shop plucking at the hairs on his chin. He saw Mak sitting next to Abu Bakar and he frowned. Every evening after he shut his shop, he would come into our house to have a smoke and a pint of Guinness with Ah Tetia and they would discuss politics and put the world right. I waved to him but he did not wave back. Just at that moment, the bullock stepped into a pothole and the cart wobbled, throwing Mak against Abu Bakar who reached out to steady her. Flesh against flesh. Unknown to us, Ah Gu was watching all this, registering it, saving it up as if for a feast. I toppled backward and the mound of hay collapsed over me. I spent the rest of the journey coughing out hay and brushing it from my dress. Further along, a waft of fishy smells reached us when we passed the fish ponds where the fishermen were bringing in the nets, the fish all bundled together, still wriggling, some escaping through torn parts of the nets. The marigolds were bright yellow, looping their vine in and out of the chain-linked fences. Maniam was by his push-cart selling ice balls, children in a queue and I was jealous of them. He was shaving the ice block across metal scrapers. Then he stuffed cooked red beans into the centre of the shaved ice and quickly compressed it into a ball and deftly tossed it around one hand as he swirled a variety of coloured syrups and evaporated milk over the sphere of ice. When Ah Tetia struck the 4-Ds, he would treat me to one and it would be the highlight of my week.

  My mother had only one thing in mind that day, so she was not conscious of how she looked sitting on that cart with Abu Bakar. Her destination was Cedar School, a couple of miles away, which she had heard was very encouraging to kampong children and not just to children of town parents. I often wondered what gave my mother such determination to get me into school. We couldn’t afford a taxi and the buses did not run from our village to the school. So after disembarking from Abu Bakar’s bullock cart at the boundary of the village, we had to walk through Senette Estate, which was a housing estate. At that time, living in an attap hut in a shanty village, the houses here looked grand, rows and rows of concrete houses, really big houses with electric lights and fenced off gardens. I had heard, too, that they had water piped into their houses. I thought they were all millionaires, locals as well as English. As we walked, Mak’s char kiak (wooden clogs) clacked rhythmically on the cement pavement, her body so fluid. She admired the beautiful flowers and talked about how she would like to have them in her garden — jasmine, frangipani, roses. She honoured the small bed of loam soil in our yard by calling it her garden where she planted chillies and pandan. As it was a long walk, Mak had brought a basket laden with two packets of her nasi lemak for our lunch and ice cream soda in an F & N bottle.

  Alkaff Gardens was located just before Cedar Schools, both secondary and primary, so Mak decided that it was a good place to stop for our packed lunch, although the gardens had a restaurant. Indeed, it was a very scenic area designed like a Japanese tea garden, with a restaurant, tea kiosks and an artificial lake to emulate old Japan. There was even a little hillock which was supposed to represent Mount Fuji. The gardens were developed by Shaik Alkaff of the Alkaff family who came over from Indonesia in 1852. The family was originally from Yemen and they made their money in the sale of spices, coffee and sugar and also in the property business. The Alkaffs sailed their boats on the lake, trained their horses in the neighbourhood and raced their bicycles and motorcycles on specially built tracks. Years later, this place became quite a beauty spot and also the location for the production of many Shaw Brothers films, one starring the famous P Ramlee and his glamorous co-star, Saloma, both of whom were my mother’s favourite film stars. All their films were like musicals, with them singing the main leads, and Mak particularly loved P Ramlee’s deep voice. But just before the war, the British requisitioned the gardens to build a camp for the Indian troops. In 1949, the Alkaffs sold the gardens to Sennett Realty Company. I was not aware of the historical significance of the gardens nor their eventual fate when we sat there for our lunch, but I loved the place. Weeping willows stood around the lake and on the surface of its water bloomed bright pink lotuses. Sparrows and swallows flitted about in the air without care; butterflies and dragonflies fluttered above our heads as we sat on the grass to eat our nasi lemak with our fingers. When we finished, we washed our hands in the lake. Years later, when the gardens were torn apart to build a school, they called the school Willow Avenue Secondary School, perhaps after the weeping willows. The hillock was dug up to fill up the lake to become the school’s playing field.

  Alkaff Gardens was my Eden. There I was still unconscious, my mind green and unplucked. Once I walked through it and arrived at the school which was just round the corner, I ate the apple which told me of my nakedness. I finally understood why Mak was so insistent about school. Children younger than myself in nicely starched white blouses and dark blue pinafores were not only chanting and writing their own language, they were speaking English, reading English, writing English. The very language that conquered nations, made rulers of men, built ships and aeroplanes, a language understood by many and not just a few. I was staggered. How small I felt and how ignorant. There was a place called a library where there were books, books and books; knowledge, wisdom and new worl
ds to be pulled out from them by the knower of the written word. There were old and new worlds compressed amongst the wood pages and suddenly the world seemed gigantic to me — the katak (frog) under the tempurong (coconut shell). My mother had no key to all these, yet she had brought me to their threshold. I felt humbled.

  Mak asked her way to the principal’s office. For someone who could not read, following directions which included signs, were not easy. So we got lost in long corridors, unpeopled rooms. Teachers and pupils looked at us in askance and I heard sniggerings in the background. What must we have looked like to them, a woman, wearing char kiak, a mark of the peasant, leading a child wearing a full-skirted dress with can-can underneath on a hot afternoon? By this time, my mother’s brow was breaking out in nervous sweat, her hand clutching mine was clammy. Eventually we were put out of our misery by a kindly Indian peon who led us to the principal’s office. The principal was a Eurasian spinster called Miss D’Souza. She was plump, her face pock-marked and her hair short. She looked so stern that I lost hope of being admitted the moment I set eyes on her. Fortunately, she spoke fluent Malay and could converse with my mother.

  “Are you Chinese or Malay?” She asked gruffly.

  It wouldn’t be unlike my mother to say, Peranakan because I knew she was as proud of her heritage as I am. But lately, she had heard that the Chinese were calling us pariahs of the race because we diluted their purity. The Malays did not want to own us either because we ate pork and worshipped Chinese Gods. As far as the British were concerned, we were plain Chinese. My mother instinctively knew that her answer would make a difference as to whether I was accepted into school or not. So she blurted out, “Chinese.”